My son's now 12 & although he was born with this condition, it wasn't diagnosed until he'd had 2 separate fits an hour long which wouldn't stop & a MRI scan showed the whole right hand 1/2 of his brain is scrambled.
He has been on Tegretol for epilepsy since age 3 which thankfully seems to control these major fits.
I feel like crying all the time as his learning difficulties are increasingly causing more problems. I work school hours so I can keep an eye on him & he's not on his own but I'm SO stressed out! He goes to a mainstream school but is in learning support classes.
I just feel his behaviour is all my fault and I must be a bad mother. My husband (not his dad) and I take him to loads of places - Disney, abroad somewhere hot every year, Wembley for the football last weekend even to a racetrack where he drove a Ferrari. He's an only child & gets all our attention.
He still head bangs walls and slaps himself in the face or threatens to kill himself when things aren't going his way. When he's annoyed he shouts and swears in the street/shops etc and it sounds like he has Tourrettes.
In the last 2 months he's stabbed and slashed our 2 new sofas and broken a neighbour's window with a brick. Yesterday he met me at work (I'm a secretary at a hospital) and whilst I was finishing off an urgent letter, he wrote "DIE" in 2 inch high letters with marker pen on the carpet in my office. It hasn't come out and it's really embarrassing. When I asked him why he'd done it he said "because someone took one of my pencil sharpeners".
He can't seem to rationalise and I can't really punish him because he doesn't understand. On holiday abroad last year a child squirted Nathan with a water pistol. Nathan then pistol whipped the child around the head hard with his water pistol - "Because he squirted me". I then had the stress of dealing with the irate parents.
Although he acts exactly as if he's on the autistic spectrum, Nathan's learning difficulties haven't been labelled and so I don't get any help or advice about how to deal with his self-harming and destructive behaviour. I'm at my wit's end.
I've managed to get an appointment with a child psychiatrist in July and will have to wait that long as none of them does private practice. Is anyone else in a similar predicament? Thanks, Becky

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